Making Sacrifices

Making Sacrifices

Hey guys!

For my last post I wanted to go over important things I learned from reading Yasser Seirawan's book and share the final thing I learned. When I did my first blog a couple months ago I knew nothing about chess except the basic rules. I did not know of the countless strategies players could use to there advantage and how hard the game really was. Now I am feel confident enough to call myself a good chess player and its all thanks to Yasser Seirawan and his amazing book. The most important think I think I learned from reading his book is that anyone can become a great chess player if they try hard enough.
The final thing I learned from reading Yasser Seirawan's book is that you must sacrifice key pieces if you want to win. One strategy I learned was the Queen sacrifice tactic which is when you sacrifice your queen in return for tactical or positional compensation. A lot of times a queen sacrifice at the right time can lead to a quick checkmate. In the picture below you can see that by letting the opponent take my queen it distracted him and I am able to get near his king.

 

This is a very risky Strategy to use against very good players since they will be able to see that you want them to attack the queen however when playing against a casual player sacrificing the queen is a very good strategy because they will want to attack the queen the first chance they get.

How do you think Sacrificing a players own pieces can benefit them?